~~~

Pages

The Name of the Lord is

a strong tower

Welcome to "From Bitter Waters to Sweet"

As I walked the streets of my small midwest town praying for the people and the churches of the town, the words came to me, "Make bitter waters sweet."Those words made no sense at the time.Surely if those words actually came from God they weren't about me. I, the pastor's wife, had a life that other women in my church envied.Shortly after that, my life fell apart and the bitterness that lurked beneath the surface came to the top.But God did not leave me there. Just as He can make crooked paths straight, raise valleys, and lower mountains, so also could He make bitter waters sweet.This blog contains bits and pieces and large chunks of my ongoing journey from bitter waters to sweet.

Monday, November 24, 2014

SoS SGC 2, The Lulling to Sleep

As I mentioned in the intro to this series, I am aware of Driscoll's tactic of front loading his messages with innocuous info to give his audience a false sense of security. He uses many words, with references and word studies at the beginning and middle of his messages to fool people into thinking that what he throws in here and there and then asserts at the end is also well researched, documented, supported and should be accepted. I saw him do this in the Peasant Princess series. I see this in the "Study Guide" as well. (Note: cn0te1 never did get back to me on where this study guide came from, even though he claimed that he copied and pasted it for my benefit, to educate me. He just thought throwing all those words with no footnotes, references, or sources should somehow be enough to shut me up.)

I started off counting paragraphs to keep track, but there are so many I've changed it to sections with paragraphs numbered in those sections.

The question is, does Song of Songs 6:13 refer to the Beloved doing a strip tease or some other sort of provocative dance?
Driscoll and cn0te1 claim that is does.
Here is the verse in question:
Songs 6:13 Come back, come back, O Shulammite;
Come back, come back, that we may gaze at you!"
Why should you gaze at the Shulammite,
As at the dance of the two companies?

Part one of the study guide goes into the Beloved's name used in the verse. That the name used, "Shulammite" is about where she comes from rather than her personal name. And the study guide asserts that she is Abishag, mentioned in I and II Kings. There is no proof or disproof of this. Some traditions believe this. Others don't. Then part one goes on more about names. It gets pretty long and confusing. But for the most part, seemingly harmless.

Part two gets into the dance of the Manahaaim which I touched on in my comment to cn0te1. The first two and a half paragraphs of part two go into the meaning of this word. But about three fourths of the way down in the third paragraph, an assertion is made. The author asserts that "the daughters of Jerusalem wish to see the Shulamite dance."
This assertion cannot be derived by reading the text, nor is there any supporting documentation that is so prevalent in the everything that led up to this assertion. It is just stated as fact, as though the text says so, itself. But it doesn't. All the text does is question why people are staring at her like at some angelic dance.
Don't get me wrong. She may very well have been dancing. That is neither provable nor un-provable. The word 'dance' is mentioned in the verse. But it is not certain that anyone was dancing, going to dance, or being requested to dance. There is simply mentioned "the dance of the two companies" which refers back to Genesis 32:2. And that dance had to do with angels. Not sex.

Paragraph 4 of part 2 gets into German words and Indian mythology, which I suppose the author found interesting. But one has to wonder why it is brought up here since it has absolutely no bearing on the verse in question. It seems to appear because the author likes to fancy himself intelligent or well-read. Or perhaps it is thrown in to further confuse people so that their defenses are down and they accept what comes next.

Paragraph 5 makes unsupported assertions concerning the verses that follow Song 6:13 in Songs Chapter 7. The word 'undeniably' is used in this assertion to try to give it credibility. Again. The verse may or may not be about dancing. And if it is about dancing, it still isn't proven that this dance is in anyway meant to be provocative.

Much is said to try to prove that there is dancing, which may or may not have been going on. And much is asserted as to what people meant or intended or implied by their words. The problem is that these things can be found in neither the plain reading of the text nor in any supporting work or documentation.

So here are a lot of words that seem to be legit (again, none of this is footnoted and given sources but enough is given a person could conceivably look them up themselves) ... anyway, there seems to be a lot of legit discourse on names and angels. But toward the end of several blocks of info there are little bits of unsupportable sex leaven sprinkled in. These little suggestions in the study are part of a sales tactic. The tactic is to plant little sex seeds in order to build up to the final flight of fantasy promoted by Driscoll (or whoever the author is) at the end of the whole spiel.